


How to Become a Trending Topic

by Mad_Lori



Series: How, Patrick [3]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Journalistic Article, M/M, Media Coverage, Patrick is a YouTuber, outside perspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:01:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28909749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Lori/pseuds/Mad_Lori
Summary: Two viral sensations collided, and the world took notice.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: How, Patrick [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2113596
Comments: 61
Kudos: 619





	How to Become a Trending Topic

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick little fun thing before I start in on the next story.

[article on www.vulture.com]

**How to Become a Trending Topic**

by Lanna McAllister

Buckle up, folks. This one’s wild. 

Once upon a time there was a wealthy family named Rose. The patriarch, Johnny, made his fortune with his eponymous chain of video stores through Canada and the northeastern US. He parlayed that into real estate holdings including apartment buildings, commercial spaces and at least one casino. Johnny’s wife, Moira, might charitably be described as a has-been soap-opera actress, best known during the events of this tale for her wildly outlandish sartorial sense and wig collection.

The Roses had two glamorous adult children, both of them fixtures on the gossip-rag paparazzi circuit. The older, David, was an artsy-dramatic gallerist better known for the array of all-gender, never-not-hot companions squiring him around the Upper East Side than for his contribution to the New York art scene. The younger, Alexis, was a Coachella-girl globetrotter who dated a series of Instagram playboys and had a tendency to turn up in odd locales, fifteen minutes late with Starbucks.

Then, disaster. Turns out that Johnny was a little too trusting; his accountant had neglected to pay taxes, stole all their money and fucked off to an unnamed non-extradition island. All their assets were seized by the state, leaving the Roses destitute. There was some gleeful schadenfreude about this, as you can imagine, but I always felt bad for them. This wasn’t Johnny’s fault, he was victimized. And when I say they were left with nothing, I don’t mean “except for a 20 room mansion and two cars,” I mean  _ nothing. _ They were allowed to keep their personal effects and (fortunately) a town by the no-seriously-what’s-it-really-called name of Schitt’s Creek, about five hours northwest of Toronto. Johnny had purchased the town when David was a teenager, as a gag gift, because...that’s a thing they did, apparently. So the Roses disappeared. Moved to Schitt’s Creek, the only place they had, and we all forgot about them. The late-night jokes petered out, the lack of papped photos kept them out of mind, and every so often an old photo would make us go, “Who? Oh right, them.”

Fast-forward several years.

Moira Rose landed some very barrel-bottom acting work in a low-budget Bosnian horror film about sentient crows. The film was shot, shelved and then purchased by Interflix (presumably to go along with their knitting-competition reality series and the entire run of “The Powers of Matthew Star”). Alexis Rose, trying to jump-start a PR/publicity career for herself, organized a local premiere which went hilariously awry (if you haven’t seen that YouTube clip I don’t even know what we’re doing here). The viral clip buoyed the film to wild success on streaming, and Moira’s newfound visibility landed her a plum role on the prime-time reboot of her former soap opera, “Sunrise Bay.” Meanwhile, Johnny had formed a new company that owned shabby-charming country motels, curating them under one brand and capitalizing on the retro cottagecore fad. Seemed like the Roses were back on track, especially after Alexis was hired by Interflix as part of their promotions team and escaped back to New York.

As for David? No one knew. He didn’t seem to have moved to Los Angeles with his parents, nor to New York with his sister. It was as if he vanished altogether.

Let’s put a pin in that.

Several years ago, a wholesome-looking buttoned-up man named Patrick started a series of YouTube videos called “How, Patrick?” in which he instructed his viewers in basic life skills. Drawing up a budget, changing the wiper fluid, unclogging a sink. He did all this while being charming and attractive (and really wearing the hell out of some tight jeans, like damn), so the channel began accumulating loyal watchers. 

But it wasn’t just Patrick’s charm that kept people watching….it was also burgeoning curiosity about his unindicted co-conspirator: David, Patrick’s off-screen, never-seen muse. First described as his business partner, the hapless David was forever clueless about performing just the sorts of tasks Patrick explained in his videos. Once David appeared on the scene (he is first mentioned in the fifth video, don’t ask me why I know that), every video was framed as a response to something David hadn’t known how to do. Patrick was never uncharitable about David’s naivete, and viewers responded to this, as so many of us are frequently the David in our own lives. Viewers endlessly speculated about The Mysterious David (as he was usually referred to in the comments sections), what their relationship was, and if David even existed or was merely a narrative tool for the videos.

Interest spiked sharply when Patrick stopped referring to “my business partner, David,” and called him “my boyfriend, David.” Over the months, David was promoted to fiancé, and finally to husband, as Patrick shared with his viewers in an unusually emotional departure from his usual format, a video titled “How to Get Married.”

Everyone loves a good how-to YouTube personality love story? I guess? 

The bigger revelation in that video was the fact that David did not know Patrick had this video channel (which blows my mind a bit). But he had to find out eventually, and finally, after long years of speculation, Patrick’s subscribers (almost half a million of them) got to see David when Patrick did his first-ever livestream Q&A, and David joined him to meet his husband’s fans.

You see where this is going, right?

Once David was on screen, it didn’t take long for the stream viewers to realize that The Mysterious David was, in fact, David Rose.

Turns out David engineered his own kind of rebound. He had opened a store that sold locally-made crafts and products, and Patrick had been a local small-business consultant who liked the idea of the store (and, one might guess, its owner) and decided to partner up with him in the venture. They fell in love and married a year after the store opened. 

The livestream, which I have watched mumbledy-mum times, contains a touching exchange where the chat asks David why he didn’t leave Schitt’s Creek with his family. He speaks with unusual frankness about his contentment with his home, his business, and his marriage. “If happiness is a place,” he said, “it is here...and anywhere else I am with him.”

Well, since then, Patrick’s channel has exploded. The second (third?) viral sensation hit the Rose family, and the whole “humiliated big-city socialite finds true love and fulfillment in small-town Canada” was described as a real-life Hallmark movie, a rom-com come true, and the ultimate Meet Cute happily-ever-after. Patrick’s channel skyrocketed from half a million subscribers to three million, as of this writing. It didn’t take long for the commentariat to sleuth out their store, Rose Apothecary, and they’ve had to post notes on their website asking for forbearance with the massive influx of online orders.

“We’re touched that everyone’s so interested in our story and our store,” David writes in the website’s blog section, “but that doesn’t mean Bill and Helen at the dairy farm can make body milk any faster.”

So, does one  _ drink _ body milk, or what?

  
  



End file.
